Thursday, April 29th, 2010
This past Easter weekend friends from New York City came to visit the farm. We got to talking about how Violet died and they wanted to see her. I thought Sam was shooting stills with her iPhone, but it turns out she was shooting video with a camera that looks like an iPhone. And so a conversation among friends on a walk in the woods was recorded, along with these pictures of Violet which are both hideous and exquisitely beautiful, and so illustrative of farm life on the edge of the forest.
Violet, a three-year-old Jersey who had never been bred, came from North Carolina to board at our farm in September 2009 with her mother, Lola. The day after they arrived I discovered Violet had not been weaned, and although she had been pastured, she was also fed molasses-sweetened grain. The result — she was 300 lbs. overweight, her udders were bulging with fluid that was not milk, and her hooves were disintegrating with a condition known as laminitis.
I put her on a diet to take the weight off. She lost about 150 lbs. in a few months and her udders shrank significantly, but the damage done to her hooves could not be reversed. Ultimately, her udders became severely infected, swollen, and almost split. The vet doubted she could calve and nurse because of fat necrosis around her internal organs, and because her udders were likely permanently damaged. Even if we could lance the udders and clear up the infection, she was in constant pain whenever she walked from the laminitis.
It was January when it came time to put Violet out of her misery. The ground was frozen. My neighbor shot her at the side of the barn, I held her while she died, and then we put her in the woods. It was a sad occasion to have to kill a sick animal, with none of the sense of accomplishment and celebration that accompanies harvesting an animal for food.
Tags: Cows, farm, fat necrosis, Sustainability